Starting a new podcast can be a daunting prospect, especially when you think about where you're going to host all those MP3's you're making! What starts off as a handful of episodes can quickly spiral into a large chunk of data that costs a small fortune to support. By making plans in advance, you can avoid facing high hosting fees or cutting off your audience.

If you're a podcaster with your own suggestions or advice to add, feel free to share and I'll update this post!

Measuring a Host

There are two things you'll need to consider when selecting a host:

Storage Space is the amount of space you can devote to your podcasts. The more storage space you have, the more episodes you can house before you need to make room for new ones. As a guideline, a CD quality stereo MP3 is about 60MB for one hour of audio. This means that for 2GB of storage space, you'll run out after about 34 episodes.

Bandwidth controls how many times your episodes can be downloaded, and is usually set on a monthly basis. As an example here, if produced one 60MB episode a month and had 15GB of bandwidth a month, your episode could be downloaded 250 times before you run out of bandwidth. More episodes means more bandwidth, so a weekly podcast would only handle about 60 downloads an episode with 15GB bandwidth. Running out of bandwidth means that your listeners can't get your shows, which stops your audience from growing.

When picking a host, ensure that you start off by planning how much bandwidth and storage space you're likely to need based on the length of your show, your frequency (weekly, fortnightly, monthly) and how many listeners you think you might get. It's worth making sure that it's easy to upgrade hosting if you need it if your show becomes unexpectedly popular, and that those upgrades are easy on the wallet!

Hosting Types

In the main, there are three different types of podcast hosts

Speciality hosts are usually dedicated to hosting podcasts and offer specific hosting deals tailored to it. They might also offer additional services like analysis of downloads. They don't usually provide much else, so aren't useful if you want to run other services on your hosting like a blog, forums, guild website and so on.

Integrated Hosts take a lot of the hard work from you by managing recording, upload, streaming and distribution for you. These generally work by providing a slot for you to call in with and perform your show, usually at a predetermined length.

Standard or Traditional Hosts provide the most flexibility about what can be stored and how, but can require a fair amount of technical know-how to set up. They can also be quite expensive if your show becomes popular, as they tend to charge more for bandwidth.

Hosting Tips

As said before, make sure your host supports easy upgrade/ downgrade of packages. If you see yourself running out of bandwidth, make sure you can buy more!

Keep track of how many downloads your show is getting. This will help you forecast when you need to upgrade your hosting.

Use Feedburner to create the feed to your podcast and point iTunes to this feed. That way, if you ever need to change hosts it's as simple as redirecting your Feedburner feed in order to update your listeners!

It actually was one of the factors that played into my doing short shows - they take up less space. I was therefore able to use the economy plan which gives 1GB storage and 100GB transfer. for 12 months it is only $4.49 per month. So far with 54 shows I have only used 475mb of space. I typically only get 150-250 dl per show so I dont think i am in any danger of running out of bandwidth.When i renew in April I will probably upgrade to the deluxe plan for $8.99 per month for 12 months (5gb/300GB)

I am tech savvy but not overly so with web design and stuff so being able to use their templates and tools is very helpful. And supposedly it is easy to convert everything to wordpress but I have no time to try to tackle that right now.

Have had no issues at all with godaddy so far been very happy.

George

edit obviously this doesnt include the domain...was lucky enough to get themanacooler.com when they were having a big sale

_________________The Mana Cooler Podcast 10-15 minutes 2-3 days a week.Tips, tricks and talk around The Mana Cooler from a Super-Casual Holy Paladin perspectivehttp://themanacooler.com

We also use libsyn for Twisted Nether but just space on a server for Polygamerous for now. Generally it is based on the number of downloads you get, how much bandwidth allowance you have on the site and such. Once you get big enough, things like Libsyn start to make sense but are also more expensive.

I have created a feedburner acct for this new super feed but am not sure how to get the separate podcast rss feeds in there so to speak. Feed burner only seems to let you put in one. So do I need to somehow add each new podcast link from the separate podcasts to the Super feed blog (sixburghstudios.com) and use an RSS from that site? It has one (http://sixburghstudios.com/podcasts-only/rss2.aspx) but i am not sure how to link the separate podcasts there (dont want to host in two places)

Sorry for the rookie question thanks for any recommendations

Thanks,George

_________________The Mana Cooler Podcast 10-15 minutes 2-3 days a week.Tips, tricks and talk around The Mana Cooler from a Super-Casual Holy Paladin perspectivehttp://themanacooler.com

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